


A Dangerous Business

by Tarimanveri (Monksandbones)



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Early in Canon, Embarrassment, Episode: s01e01 Children of the Gods (1), Episode: s01e02 Children of the Gods (2), Gen, Getting to Know Each Other, POV Female Character, Season/Series 01, Sexism, Teambuilding, Threatened vomiting, Women in the Military
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-23
Updated: 2014-03-23
Packaged: 2018-01-16 16:33:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1354195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Monksandbones/pseuds/Tarimanveri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She was a captain in the United States Air Force. She had a doctorate. She was never going to admit to having left her stove on, even if she had.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Dangerous Business

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the summer 2006 Sam Carter Gen Ficathon, for Lyore's request: little bit of angst, little bit of humour, little bit of fluff.
> 
> Originally archived [here](http://samcarterfic.livejournal.com/11602.html), subsequently archived at my abandoned fic journal [here](http://tarimanveri-fic.livejournal.com/5221.html).

It was a beautiful morning on P8Z-282, inasmuch as it was actually late afternoon on Earth. The natives were friendly, inasmuch as there were no natives, as far as they could tell. And the planet promised to be fascinating, inasmuch as preliminary surveys indicated the presence of an ore in scattered outcroppings on the surface with properties that seemed to defy several laws of physics.

And striding along with her pack and her scanner and her MP5 and her first batch of soil samples already collected, Captain Samantha Carter’s blood suddenly ran cold.

Oh, God.

It was the worst of all travel clichés. And by the worst… it really was the worst. Did it actually happen to anyone? Oh, no. The bitter truth flowed through her. Apparently it happened to her. Oh, God. Her house could be burning down now. She was officially – officially – the world’s biggest moron.

She was on another planet. And she’d left her stove on.

Oh, God.

As her mind cast about wildly for some hopeful shred of memory to prove her growing certainty wrong, her gaze fell, and stuck upon, Colonel O’Neill, walking point a few yards to her right, gun raised, concentration fierce, demeanor unruffled. Oh, God. The memory of their rancorous first meeting still echoed in her head whenever she thought about it too hard and whenever… well, now. To think she had actually comforted herself afterwards that there was nothing worse she could do. Scratch that. She’d just discovered whole new depths to plumb.

Not that she was going to plumb them.

Would the insurance cover it if you knew it was going to happen but didn’t do anything about it? Would it still cover it if you couldn’t say why you didn’t do anything about it? Were there clauses for off-world travel and inscrutable CO’s who would do anything for their men if only you could figure out how to make them think of you as one of them?

Sam gave herself a mental shake and tried to think. She’d been on base for both breakfast and lunch. The oatmeal and sandwich were still sitting solidly in her stomach. If she’d left a burner on, it would have to have been overnight and she’d have noticed in the morning. But no, somehow she must have – maybe she’d been thinking of making tea. She could see herself turning the dial to maximum; she could see the red glow of the element.

She was starting to feel sick thinking about it. She was starting to feel sick, which was only too reminiscent of her first trip through the ‘Gate and how cocky she’d been and then how awful she’d felt and how satisfied the smirks of the rest of the Colonel’s team had been.

Actually, she was approaching how awful she’d felt that time. At this rate, she was going to be sitting on the ground and groaning – again – in no time, and the Colonel would remember the last time, which hadn’t really been that long ago, and he’d start to question, if he wasn’t already, her worth as an officer in the field…

It hadn’t quite come to that, but it was getting close. Her gauzy kitchen curtains were probably drifting above the range now, starting to char delicately around the edges as they came in contact with the red-hot burners, and bursting into flames. Then, her cabinets, her walls, her wooden framed house, all because she was too absent-minded to check these things before she left. Leaving her stove on… the Colonel wasn’t the only person who was maybe starting to doubt her worth as a field officer.

Image after image of destruction and disgrace passed before her eyes. Her stomach gurgled menacingly. In her preoccupation, she stumbled. Then the worst happened. The Colonel noticed. He paused. He turned his disconcertingly intense gaze on her. Their eyes met. He noticed.

“What’s wrong, Captain?” he asked.

“Nothing, sir,” she ground out between clenched teeth. She was a captain in the United States Air Force. She had a doctorate. She was never going to admit to having left her stove on, even if she had.

He wasn’t going to let it go, she could tell. “Captain, spit it out,” he ordered.

If he didn’t stop trying to make her talk, she was going to do more than spit it out. She was going to throw it up.

“Nothing, sir,” she managed, holding her breath as she formed the words.

“Captain!”

Bile rose in her throat. She couldn’t help it. She gagged and fell to her knees. She clutched her stomach and breathed deeply, trying to stave off the inevitable. She was going to throw up. And then she was probably going to cry.

Then Daniel passed out in an unceremonious heap a few feet away and she was spared her moment of humiliation at her new CO’s feet. The wave of nausea subsided a little, and she sat up and crawled over to where Colonel O’Neill and Teal’c were kneeling next to Daniel’s senseless form. The Colonel was tapping Daniel’s face lightly and saying “time to wake up and smell the coffee, Danny.” Teal’c was frowning down on them both, but then, when wasn’t he frowning? She was the piece that didn’t fit this puzzle, and she was still feeling dangerously sick besides.

Daniel stirred and groaned.

The Colonel sat back. “What’s going on?” he asked.

Daniel pushed himself up slowly. “I feel awful,” he said, wiping his forehead with his sleeve. “What just happened?”

“You passed out,” said the Colonel. He patted Daniel’s shoulder. “Just sit for a minute. Breathe.” Sam took a deep breath herself. If she could just not move for a while and get her stomach under control and pull herself back together while the Colonel was distracted with Daniel…

Unfortunately, the Colonel wasn’t playing along. Having seemingly reassured himself that Daniel was in no immediate danger, he turned back to her, and the pathetic spectacle she was doubtless presenting.

“Captain,” he said, frowning at her, “are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

He looked irritated. She still felt horrible. She was going to have to say something, and that something was going to have to provide a lot of damage-control.

“I don’t feel very well either, sir,” she said. It came out more shakily than she would have liked. A lot more shakily. Next thing, he was going to be bringing out the smelling salts.

The Colonel looked at her skeptically. “You don’t feel very well?” he asked. “You don’t feel very well?”

Ugh. She could almost hear the mocking quotation marks around “feel very well.” Now she felt like he had removed her churning stomach and put it on an elevator and pushed “down.” She swallowed, hard, and looked at the nice, steadying ground beneath her knees. “I’m fine, sir,” she said, still altogether too weakly. “Just give me a minute.”

“Captain!” he barked. “Look at me.”

She raised her head reluctantly. He looked even more irritated than he had moments ago. Her traitorous body… her traitorous mind. Why couldn’t all this have waited until she was back on Earth? So she came home and discovered that her house had burned down, so what? That was having a bad day. This was failing in her duty.

She jumped at the unexpected weight of the Colonel’s hand between her shoulder blades, and then shuddered at the wave of sickness the motion prompted.

“Captain Carter,” he said, in almost the same encouraging voice he’d used talking to Daniel a minute ago, “talk to me. You don’t look fine.”

His hand was still on her back, rubbing up and down her spine. It felt good. It felt soothing. And she felt so awful. “I feel terrible, sir,” she admitted in barely more than a whisper. “And…” she was actually going to say it, because he wasn’t yelling at her, and because it suddenly seemed like it would remove such a weight from her if she let it go. “And I’m, I’m pretty sure I um, left my stove on at home this morning.”

“Oh, God,” Daniel said, sitting bolt upright before the Colonel could offer up any kind of reaction to her imbecility.

“Daniel?” the Colonel asked. He took his hand off her back and turned to look at Daniel again.

“Oh, God,” Daniel repeated. “I left my office window open and I was translating this priceless…”

“You are surely mistaken, Daniel Jackson,” said Teal’c, from the defensive position he had taken up next to the three of them. “Your office has no windows. It is, in fact, underground.”

Daniel looked perplexed. “I know it is, but I swear…”

The Colonel looked from Daniel to Sam and back. “I know you’re both geeks and you’re new to this field thing, Daniel,” he said, shaking his head, “but this is ridiculous. I want us off this planet and back in the infirmary so the doc can have a look at you.”

“What?” Sam asked, confused. The Colonel actually thought there was something legitimately wrong here? When the only problem was that she’d left her stove on and had panicked about it? Daniel seemed equally shocked. He squinted at the Colonel, mouth open. “But Jack,” he began, “you can’t just…”

The Colonel cut him off. “Oh yes, I can,” he said, holding up a hand. “The rocks are still going to be here tomorrow. We, however, are on another planet, and we don’t know what you’ve been exposed to. We’re going back.” He picked up his gun and stood up. “Are you good to walk?”

“Um,” said Daniel.

The Colonel motioned to Teal’c. Teal’c hoisted Daniel to his feet. Sam put a hand on the ground and surreptitiously tried to boost herself up. It was all very well for Daniel to get away with suddenly having legs like limp noodles, but he was an archaeologist and the Colonel already liked him. She, on the other hand, was a…

“Captain?” the Colonel asked, turning to her just as she got her feet under her, just in time to witness her tumble forward on legs that, in addition to how sick she still felt to her stomach, did not want to support her weight.

“Sorry, sir,” she mumbled. So maybe he believed that something was wrong, but holy Hannah, would the humiliation never end?

The next thing Sam knew, the Colonel was hauling her up. He slung her arm across his shoulders and she slumped against him. She would have preferred cringing or maybe dropping dead on the spot, but she didn’t seem to have much choice in the matter. “Sorry, sir,” she repeated, miserably.

“Captain,” he said impatiently, “Lay off the apologies.”

Oh, right. He’d acknowledged the problem. She wasn’t supposed to be blaming herself any longer. “You’re not…” she asked.

“No, I’m not,” said the Colonel, all but dragging her over to Teal’c and Daniel. “You’re human. You get sick. Relax. Now hang on and let’s get us all through the ‘Gate before I have to pick you up and carry you.”

“Yes, sir,” said Sam, trying to urge her uncooperative legs into action. She made her stumbling way back to the ‘Gate and through the event horizon held bodily upright on one side by the Colonel, arm-in-arm with Daniel on her other side, clutching him for balance as hard as her wobbly limbs could manage, swearing to herself that she would never turn on her stove again, but in the final analysis, glad the Colonel and Teal’c were there to help her get home.

Sixteen hours of treatment in the infirmary with pretty close to every antibiotic known to man later, Sam was starting to feel her symptoms subside. She’d made it back to earth with her soil samples intact, and an emergency team of specialists in biohazard suits had quickly identified a previously-unknown species of neurotoxin-releasing bacteria in the planet’s soil. Revised protocols for taking soil samples were already in place.

The curtains around her bed rustled and parted to admit the Colonel.

“So, delusions, hallucinations, nausea, and loss of muscle control?” he said, coming to sit in the chair next to her. “Those bugs really pack a wallop, wouldn’t you say, Captain?”

Sam sat up and rested her arms on her knees. She had to admit, it was nice to be able to move again. It was also nice that the Colonel had come to see her, but… “Shh, sir. Daniel’s asleep,” she said, motioning at the curtains off to her right.

The Colonel scooted his chair closer to her bedside. It scraped horribly against the concrete floor. She glared at him. She’d been the one who’d asked Daniel to help her take the samples and exposed him to the bacteria in the first place; the least she could do was ensure that he could recover in peace.

“Sorry, Captain,” he said, letting go of the armrests of the chair and instead leaning closer to her. “But look, not feeling very well? What was that?”

“I wasn’t feeling very well, sir,” she said.

“Captain…”

“I didn’t realize I was delusional, sir. I thought I’d left my stove on, I really did. I don’t think I was hallucinating…” she said, and then caught herself, remembering the image of her curtains floating dreamily above the range. She didn’t have curtains in her kitchen. “I don’t think I was hallucinating much, sir,” she amended.

“And the nausea?”

“I could have worked through it,” Sam protested. “I’ve got a job to do out there and if I’m going to let something like that keep me from doing it, I might as well…”

The Colonel cut her off. “Captain, what part of ‘alien bacterial infection’ doesn’t make sense to you? If something’s wrong, as your CO I need to know.”

“Yes, but sir…”

“I know we’ve had a rocky start, Captain, but I’m not going to kick you off my team because you catch the odd alien bug or get carsick going through the ‘Gate,” he said.

Oh. Was he actually implying that he’d said things he regretted on that first mission? That was a comforting thought. And if he kicked her off his team, it would be because of a worse flaw than an easily-upset stomach. Although he hadn’t actually said that he wasn’t still thinking of getting rid of her…”

“Is that clear?” he asked, snapping her attention back to him. He looked annoyed again.

“Yes, sir,” she said, briskly.

The Colonel’s face softened. He smiled. “So relax, Captain,” he said. “Every time we go out there, we have no idea what we’re going to find. As far as I’m concerned, you’re doing fine.”

“Thanks, sir,” she said, smiling back.

“You’re welcome,” he said, reaching over and patting her knee. “Now, you feeling better yet? Because now that I know the alien bacteria haven’t walloped you too much, I’ve got to go and finish my report.”

“I’m feeling a lot better,” said Sam, and she was. Maybe by dinner time she’d be feeling like eating again. Maybe she’d last more than the six weeks a couple of the guys from the first mission to Abydos had bet each other she’d take to get dismissed from SG-1. Maybe she’d even end up really being one of Colonel O’Neill’s men.

The Colonel stood up and clapped his hands together. “Excellent,” he said. “I’ll see you at fourteen hundred hours tomorrow for debriefing, if the doc’s cleared you by then.” He made as if to leave her partitioned-off enclosure, but just as he put his hand out to move the curtain, he paused and turned to look back at her. “Just… Captain?” he asked. “From now on, how about you always double-check your stove before you go off-world?”


End file.
